Nathaniel Rateliff and Regina Carter Release Albums

“I’ve got pain and I’m gonna salt it now,” Nathaniel Rateliff announces in “Don’t Get Too Close,” one of the up-tempo songs on his third album, “Falling Faster Than You Can Run.” Despair, striving, stubbornness, longing and brief glimmers of hope fill his new songs, as they have in the past. An acoustic guitar, both frail and comforting, is still at the core of the music. But Mr. Rateliff is not just brooding anymore. On the new album, he also plugs in and gets riled up now and then, finding strength on the far side of his longtime folky melancholy.

Mr. Rateliff’s old introversion hasn’t disappeared. His lyrics are elusive and imagistic, but telling: “I don’t want to brag, but we made it out alive.”

Through the album, as he sings about a tangle of relationships, music, old injuries and tentative solace, the prime cause of his frustration and disappointment is most likely to be himself. “I don’t know a goddamn thing!” he rails, with raw desperation, in the album’s opening song, “Still Trying.”

His voice is honeyed and mournful, and many of the tracks leave it bravely exposed: just a lightly strummed guitar, brushes on the drums, perhaps a distant piano or a harmony vocal. But often, with little warning, the dynamics open up radically. Mr. Rateliff produced the album with its engineer, Jamie Mefford, and their understanding of hand-played instruments in intimate spaces is meticulous and startling: the loneliness surrounding a quietly picked guitar, the liberating thrust as an electric guitar suddenly breaks in and the hollowness it can leave behind.

Few of the songs continue the same arrangement from start to finish; they change from verse to verse, and sometimes line to line. In its five and a half minutes, “Forgetting Is Believing” — an enigmatic song about conflict, separation and shared accomplishment despite it all — moves from floating electric-guitar raga to acoustic anthem to vocal chorale to full-tilt electric march, with every fluctuation serving the mood.

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Nathaniel Rateliff's "Falling Faster Than You Can Run."

The finale of “Falling Faster Than You Can Run” is the album’s title song, which finds its own eerie quietude: an ensemble of sustained and slightly wavering strings, a sparsely plucked guitar, and Mr. Rateliff’s voice, low and diffident. “I’m gonna fall and probably should,” he confides. “Catching me, you never could.”

The song lingers in an isolated limbo, alone and out of reach, until Mr. Rateliff intones its last line, a last-ditch reconciliation as the strings hover far above him: “I’ll tear off my shirt,” he decides, “and wrap it around your wound.” JON PARELES

REGINA CARTER

“Southern Comfort”

(Sony Masterworks)

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The violinist Regina Carter was born and raised in Detroit, and the texture of that city’s jazz culture, past and present, has been a steadfast if often subtle presence in her music. On “Southern Comfort,” her bracing new album, she turns her focus to a chapter in her family history that preceded the Great Migration, when her paternal grandfather was a coal miner in Alabama. The result is a meditation on American roots music with barely a whiff of the musty carpetbag, and more than a hint of personal investment.

Ms. Carter, has never had difficulty communicating grace or clarity on her instrument: She has a glowing, dark-maple tone, and an effortless way of phrasing a melody. Her conceptual leap in recent years has revolved around her stance within a band. On her fine previous album — the 2010 “Reverse Thread” (eOne), a celebration of African folk music — she gathered a crew that included the accordionist Will Holshouser, the bassist Chris Lightcap and her husband, the drummer Alvester Garnett.

Her deft, springy rapport with those musicians was worth building on, so it’s good news that they return here, in small-group settings that also include either Marvin Sewell or Adam Rogers on guitar and Jesse Murphy occasionally replacing Mr. Lightcap on bass. (Some of them will be playing with her at Birdland Tuesday through Saturday.) And her research sketches a continuum: “Miner’s Child,” the album’s opener, adopts the bounce of Cajun music as well as its West African antecedent, making a point much like the one in portions of “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” the recent PBS series.

Ms. Carter mostly culled the material for “Southern Comfort” from field recordings in the Library of Congress, commissioning new arrangements from her peers in and out of the ranks of the band. Among the smart results is an arrangement of “Shoo-Rye,” by Laurence Hobgood, that flirts with Coplandesque grandeur; a sweetly rustic version of “Hickory Wind,” the Gram Parsons-Bob Buchanan tune; and a take on “Trampin' ” built over a sinuous Nigerian Afrobeat groove.

Though Ms. Carter sings on one track, “I Moaned and I Moaned,” it’s her violin that generally serves as a surrogate voice. On “Cornbread Crumbled in Gravy” especially, she brings a muted assurance, calming and bittersweet. Only later do you hear her inspiration, stashed away as a hidden track: a recording of the song that features Vera Hall, singing no more forcefully than one would a lullaby, but with purpose. NATE CHINEN

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